Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The answer to the question of Problem 703 is yes. Theorem 1.1 of Forbidden intersections, recorded with its proof on the library page Theorem 1.1, states that for every there is such that a family of subsets of an -element set with no two members meeting in exactly points, where is an integer, has at most members; the library page checks that the bound also holds under the problem's convention, which forbids the intersection for every pair including . In the problem's notation this gives, for every , a with whenever : for take below the theorem's constant, and for the range of is empty. The proof deletes coordinates one at a time while tracking a widening forbidden interval of intersection sizes, with Harper's isoperimetric inequality as its external input. The site notes that a yes answer implies the exponential growth of the chromatic number of the unit-distance graph of , which Frankl and Wilson [FrWi81] had proved by other means.
Depends on. Frankl and Rödl (1987), Theorem 1.1.
Acceptance. Refereed: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 300 (1987), no. 1, 259–286, received 24 October 1985; the issue is dated March 1987, and the page is dated to the first day of that month. Reviewed: Thomas Bloom, the site's curator, marks the problem proved and credits the yes answer to Frankl and Rödl [FrRo87]. The library's compilation of the theorem's proof chain is reading coverage and not acceptance evidence.
Formalization. Boris Alexeev's repository holds a Lean 4 development,
added on 2026-08-17, whose header calls it a formalization of a solution to
the problem, names Frankl and Rödl as the informal authors and "Codex" and
"GPT-5.6 Sol" as the formal authors, and cites a write-up tex/703.tex for
the mathematical proof and the formalization map. Its top-level theorem
states the problem's second question in the problem's own form, for every
a with whenever
, under the convention that forbids the
intersection for every pair including , and the Frankl–Rödl argument is
carried in a separate module; the file is linked above at the commit the
formal-conjectures statement file pins when it names the development as the
problem's formal proof. This corpus has not built or audited that
development, so the page lists no formalized evidence; the acceptance
rests on the refereed paper and the curator's credit.